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The International Workshop Series of Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP) is the premier forum of the ACL Special Interest Group on Finite-State Methods (SIGFSM). It serves researchers and practitioners working on:

FSMNLP 2012 will be organized shortly before CIAA. The 17th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA) will take place in Porto, Portugal on July 17-20, 2012 (800 km from Donostia-San Sebastián).

These consecutive periods as well as the European locations, facilitate the attendance at both conferences.

The special theme does not restrict the scope of papers; rather, the purpose is to attract, apart from other topics, a variety of submissions relating to any practical dimension of finite-state NLP. Especially welcome are succinct short paper submissions focused on some specific practical aspect or solution o finite-state NLP. This could be related to e.g. a grammar, a linguistic phenomenon, a linguistic modeling problem, a machine learning problem, a software tool that implements or uses finite-state technology, etc. We hope that the theme provides us with the possibility of organizing suitable poster, short presentation, and demo sessions related to particular practical problems.

For example, today, a large number of languages have morphological/phonological models based on finite-state technology. While most such implementations follow standard design patterns, many grammars also contain elegant non-trivial solutions to some language-specific modeling problem (vowel harmony, reduplication, long-distance agreement, opaque phonological alternations, free variation, morphosyntactic restrictions, etc.). For this year's FSMNLP, we encourage submissions of short papers that focus on documenting such solutions and at the same time providing context by summarizing the development and implementation of the overall grammar.

For more information on submission guidelines, please view our website: